There are many design techniques to support the co-design of tangible technologies. However, few of these design methods allow the involvement of users at scale and across diverse geographic locations. While popular in psychology, the story completion method (SCM) has only recently started to be adopted within the HCI community. We explore whether SCM can generate meaningful design insights from large, diverse study populations for the design of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs). Based on the results of two questionnaire studies using SCM, we conclude that the method can be used to generate meaningful design insights. Drawing on a systematic review of 870 TUI papers, we then contextualise the strengths and weaknesses of SCM against commonly used design methods, before reflecting on our experience of using the method across two distinct domains. We discuss the advantages of the method (particularly in terms of the scale and diversity of participation) and the challenges (particularly around constructing meaningful story stems, and developing the correct level of scaffolding to support creativity). We conclude that SCM is particularly suitable to be used in the early stages of the design process to understand the socio-cultural context of deployment.

A growing body of work explores the well-being of students. However, little work has addressed the experiences of student mothers, who must juggle the demands of study and childcare simultaneously. The rise of the student mother is taking place at a time when student learning and engagement as well as childcare has become highly digitised. Existing literature on work/life balance suggests a key issue for student mothers is management of the work-family border, such that they can choose to segregate or blend roles as appropriate. In this study, we used work-family border theory to examine the role that technology plays in supporting both the segregation and blending of student and parent roles, making recommendations for the ways that boundary maintenance might be more explicitly considered in digital systems design.